Is Lucas Bigger Liar Than Killer?

DALLAS — Convicted murderer Henry Lee Lucas is either the most profligate serial killer in the nation`s history or one of America`s all-time biggest liars. He could be both.

The question of whether Lucas` confessions to about 500 murders are true ignited a controversy this week that sent sparks flying among law-enforcement agencies here and around the country.

The answer lies hidden in the mind of a one-eyed enigma whose past is checkered with drifting, deception and death. Lucas, 48, was recently quoted by a newspaper here as asserting in a year-old interview that all but three of his hundreds of confessions were bogus and that he perpetrated the hoax to embarrass police and show that ``law enforcement doesn`t do its job.``

Lucas isn`t being allowed to talk publicly about those statements and the uproar they caused. He appeared Wednesday before a grand jury in central Texas to do some more confessing, but now authorities are taking a harder look at his claims.

On one side of the controversy are the skeptics. Texas Atty. Gen. Jim Mattox jumped in this week with the pronouncement he does not believe Lucas committed every murder to which he has confessed.

Moreover, Mattox revealed that his office has been re-investigating at least 13 of Lucas` confessions in recent months, along with McLennan County District Atty. Vic Feazell in Waco, where the grand jury heard testimony from Lucas Wednesday on two more unsolved murder cases.

``I know that there is substantial desire among law-enforcement people to clear cases, and sometimes cases are cleared even when it`s not justified,``

Mattox said.

On the other side of the debate are believers like Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell, who helped get Lucas a conviction for murder and a death sentence in 1983, and the Texas Rangers, who have been running a special task force since then and coordinating visits by more than 1,000 lawmen from around the country eager to interview Lucas.

The Lucas Homicide Task Force has helped authorities from 27 states

``clear`` their books of nearly 200 murder cases so far, more than 100 of them in Texas. Lucas has claimed 31 killings in Illinois out of a professed national death toll of 360 to 500.

Amid growing doubts, Boutwell and the Rangers pointed out that local authorities, not the task force, are the ones who actually declare cases cleared. While they acknowledge that some police may have been in a hurry to clear their books, they also insist that Lucas was the perpetrator in the vast majority of those cleared.

The top Texas lawman this week also called ``ludicrous`` Lucas` claim that he killed only three people. Col. James Adams, director of the Department of Public Safety, said authorities have attributed 189 murders to Lucas.

Adams argued that ``in over 100 cases, he (Lucas) led officers to the

(crime) scene without any guidance from them. In the majority of them, he`s providing information that could not have been known by anyone but the murderer.``

After having patiently coaxed confessions out of Lucas with cordial treatment and privileges like cigarettes, coffee and television, Sheriff Boutwell and the Rangers who run the task force are in the awkward position of defending themselves against suggestions that they may have been duped or that they threatened to send Lucas to Death Row if he didn`t keep talking.

``Lucas is no dummy,`` Boutwell said. ``He knew that (constant confessions) would keep him from the penitentiary. It wouldn`t take a guy with a Ph.D to figure that out.``

But Boutwell dismissed suggestions that Lucas had been threatened into making confessions and said the newspaper stories were full of ``half-truths`` and based on interviews more than a year old. He added that Dallas Times-Herald reporter Hugh Aynesworth, who wrote most of the series, was writing a book about Lucas when ``they had a falling-out and Lucas started distrusting him and wouldn`t see him any more.``

Aynesworth said Wednesday night that as recently as last November, Lucas told him in interviews that his confessions were a hoax. ``I don`t have any idea how many he really killed,`` Aynesworth said. ``We just tried to show that on many of them he couldn`t have been there.`` Aynesworth denies that he has a book contract but says he hopes to write a book about Lucas.

An angry Boutwell, asked to explain the investigations of task force activities, declared ``that district attorney (Feazell) up there may have political ambitions. I know our attorney general (Mattox) certainly does.``

The Times-Herald articles describe in detail a long private investigation that showed through work records and other documents that Lucas was often in one state on the same day he supposedly committed murder in another.